Ancient Chesapeake site challenges timeline of humans in the Americas

[wnylib]

9. I have some Native ancestry through my paternal grandmother

so I am aware that many Native people are resistant to DNA testing, not only of remains found by archaeologists, but also of DNA testing of living Native people.

Objections to DNA testing are based on both religious views of not disturbing ancestors and on the abuses of studies of Native people by racist pseudoscientists in the past.

But not all Native people have such strong objections to DNA testing. My grandmother was descended from a past Seneca leader but we have no paper documentation of it. When I discussed that with Seneca people at a cultural museum on Seneca territory, they suggested that I do DNA testing to locate other descendants of that leader who might be able to help me with records, or at least to prove that descent through DNA. The Seneca Nation has a genealogy group and many Senecas have had their DNA tested in order to learn about non Native ancestry in their families. Quite a few enrolled tribal members have mixed ancestry. Mixed ancestry is also true of many other Native tribal nations, just like many African Americans also have some European or other ancestry.

As for where the people from the Chesapeake area came from, we can't know without DNA analysis of the remains that were found there. The ability to do a DNA analysis will depend on consent of Native people from the area per NAGPRA, if they can be located.

When I suggested in an earlier post that I favor travel by boat for the first people in the Americas, I was not suggesting that they sailed the open ocean in a seagoing vessel from China or Japan across the wide expanse of the Pacific. Or even that they island hopped across the open Pacific at its wider distances. I believe that people hugged the northern coasts between northeastern Asia and northwestern North America.

It takes time for glaciers to grow and spread over large areas of land. It's a process that does not happen overnight. So, while glaciers were growing and sea levels were gradually getting lower, more land was exposed between Alaska and northeastern Asia, reducing the distance to travel by boat between Asia and North America. That would have been happening even before the land was fully exposed to create the Beringian land bridge. Also the distance between islands in the Aleutian chain, which extends in a semi circle on the southern rim of the Bering Sea between Asia and North America, would have been smaller, making it possible for people to island hop the Aleutians from Asia to North America. Therefore, people could have entered North America before the glaciers spread enough to block access.

Any people who continued down the coast of North America would likely have done it by hugging the coastline where they could come ashore to build camps, repair or make new tools and boats, hunt land animals, etc.

I do not believe that any humans were traveling by boat across the whole open Pacific at its wider points 20,000 years ago. Even the expert Polynesian sailors were not doing that until several thousand years later than 20,000 years ago.